The synopsis for JLA #124 (due in January) includes the phrase, “he loses focus on stopping The Key and saving Dawn, and turns his energies on an even deadlier foe.”
Now, I know these are separate DC characters, but my first thought was “But Dawn is the Key!”
Once you start down the Buffy path…
It’s refreshing when a movie you’ve anticipated for years actually lives up to your expectations. It’s unprecedented when it happens twice in one weekend. MirrorMask and Serenity were both amazing.
The MirrorMask theater listing looks like a tour schedule, with the film opening in a few more cities each week. Unfortunately, at least some theaters that have it now won’t have it by next weekend, so we’re going to have to catch it again one night this week. Then we’ll seek Serenity again on the weekend. Somewhere in there we’ll find time for the other movies we wanted to see.
We’ve got a more thorough review of Serenity planned…
You know that new site selling JMS’ Babylon 5 scripts?
Within 48 hours, fans subscribing to the announcement list filled up the database. The remark in that message is a variation on a line JMS would use when he told stories about trying to get a big enough room for B5 events at conventions: “My people are coming.” (He eventually managed to get that line into an episode of the show.) Con staff would constantly underestimate the draw for B5 panels.
I’m also reminded of a joke David Kemper made at a Farscape panel last year: “You guys probably don’t know this, but we have obsessive fans.”
My regular comic store, Comic Quest, didn’t get any copies of Peter David’s Spike: Old Times. Yesterday I checked at Comics Toons and Toys. They were also sold out. Today I started looking around more of the Orange County area.
First step: Mile High Comics. I figured it was a long shot, since they’re the most well-known comic store on the internet, but I wasn’t in a hurry to read it, and it would save me the trouble of driving around the county. Naturally, they didn’t have it.
So I started calling stores I knew. As I was about to start, I noticed an email on SuperHeroNews saying, “Mile High Comics in LA, burned down last night, more information as we get it.” The first store on my list was Netherworld Comics, which used to be a Mile High store, but is in Garden Grove, not Los Angeles. Their phone isn’t picking up. And they’re still listed as an affiliate on Mile High’s website. And there aren’t any other Mile High stores in southern California. This doesn’t look good for Netherworld. Edit Sep. 7: Yes, it was them [archive.org]. Figures. I’d only been in there a couple of times, but it was a nice store.
Okaaay… Next step: Diamond’s Comic Shop Locator. Unfortunately it only lets you search by ZIP code, and only shows the nearest three. Since I’d already been to two of the stores, I only got one phone number out of it. No luck there.
Time to do it the old-fashioned way: the phone book. (Katie remarked, “There’s nothing wrong with being old-fashioned, especially about a book called Old Times.”) There are surprisingly few comic stores in central Orange County. I only got three more numbers out of it, and one of them specializes in vintage comics. Not surprisingly, none of them had any copies either. (One offered to order it for me, but I simply declined rather than pointing out that it was already sold out at both the publisher and distributor.)
Next stop: eBay…
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Van Helsing, and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow should make a trilogy of sorts.
All three are cheesy action/adventure films that can be quite enjoyable if you watch them with the right attitude. The first two both take characters from classic literature and weave them into a story about Victorian-era secret agents — and both have rooftop battles with Mr. Hyde in Paris. Sky Captain uses tropes from the serials instead of actual characters, but again deals with semi-secret paramilitary organizations that have more advanced technology than the general public. And, like LXG, it finishes at a villain’s secret fortress in the Himalayas.
Our friend Jason spotted this partial sign over the weekend:
As you may or may not be aware, an alien foodstuff called spoo was a running joke in Babylon 5. The first time it was mentioned in the show, someone asked what it was, and JMS replied with a long, humorous explanation.
(Thanks to Wayne for taking the photo.)
Mnemovore #5 came out this week. (For some reason issue #4 shipped twice—once just before Comic-Con and again last week.) This week’s issue, or at least my copy, has a strange quirk to it. Some of the word balloons are faded, as if a rubber stamp was pushed down with unequal force, or as if someone ran a gradient tool over the text with Photoshop. I’m still not sure whether it’s intentional or just a coloring or printing error.
This scan should be relatively non-spoilery:
At one point I thought they might be the result of coloring gradients applied above the word balloons instead of below, but I could only get a few to match up.
The thing is, it’s appropriate for the book—if maddening to try to read. The premise is that into our information-saturated world has come a predator that feeds on information, eating people’s memories and leaving them amnesiac or worse. In a story about information loss, gaps in information make thematic sense. And there was one panel with the same effect last issue: “They can make it so you can’t…”
Just one issue to go…
